Ian g

I left the house at 7am, not particularly confident, but I went panning anyway. There were a few reasons why I didn’t have my usual “ get up and go “ attitude when wakening up to the sounds of  “ I’m happy “ by Pharrell L Williams. The first reason was the weather, it’s hot. Well it’s 26 degrees C which is far too hot for a Scotsman, I mean our natural skin colour is pale blue. The second reason was that I had all but done with the area I had been prospecting for a while. I thought with the heat that maybe a leisurely stroll along some bedrock outcrops would be much more economical than the usual set up, and that actually was the third reason. I had never seriously done any dry land crevicing before. 
Pharrell Williams really put the tin lid on it with the lyrics “ no offence to you, don’t waste you’re time “. These lyrics were in my head and on repeat all day haha!

Arriving at the car park deep in the Leadhills an hour after leaving the house I was cussing the weatherman for getting it correct again. They’ve did this for the umpteenth time this year and nobody seems to complain. WELL I AM.     
Anyway, it was hot and the Leadhills are barren of any cover whatsoever, making the walk from the car park to my familiar stomping ground that extra bit tiring, so I took the opportunity of a few photos as an excuse to pause now and then, though pausing only made me more lethargic, as like I said there’s no shelter from the sun at all. A green desert.

The views when walking along the old railway line are lovely on the eyes due to the elevation of the old line. The green hills roll on into the distance, and when stopping to take it in, so too does my mind. Looking out and over the valley from the old railroad, i can almost feel the presence of the old timers are still here with me.

The burn winds it’s way along the valley floor like a main artery, fed by the veins that run straight down off the hills and that provide fresh water for the flocks, and replenished gold for the prospector. 

The farmhouse stands alone like a kings guard in defiance of the elements. A constant feature of the valley it helps to protect. The burn offers life for its flock too.

The great thing about walking an old railroad is that it’s almost perfectly flat until……..

you reach a hill😃

At least it was downhill, and ideal for a perfect approach. 
At the bottom of the hill I would cut left and walk the short distance to the start of the bedrock outcrop that I wanted to work.     
 

Made it, phew!

The plan for the day was to first head uphill along the bedrock looking for easy areas to work before removing the small amount of gravel still remaining in the pool on the bottom left of the photo. I planned things in that order because I knew there was still a flake or two of gold in the gravel, and therefore if I blanked with the crevicing then I still had the gravel as a last resort. I also knew that once that tiny amount of gravel was removed then that was me finished in the area, an area I’ve sort of became attached to over the last few months. I was prolonging the inevitable really.

After a quick look at the pool I made my way up and over the rock wall. From now on in the only water I would see was the stuff in my bag, for up this high the stream dries out completely. On a positive note the lack of water means I can take my time to reach far down into the crevices where I could study them without the chill of the water that charges through in autumn and winter. A pleasing change indeed.

I wasn’t long before I reached my the decent looking area to work.

Doesn’t that in the photo just scream gold. The way the bedrock slopes down at angles that trap. 
No doubt this spot has been worked judging by the gravel that not just looks loose, but I can confirm was loose, and after what seemed like an eternity to reach bottom, I found nothing.

The bedrock crevices started wide, but by the time I reached as far down as I could they were too narrow to empty out. 
 

Moving on I found the next good looking area not much further upstream, but like the last area looks can be deceiving.

I like the way the bedrock funnels down in a v shape into the pool, helping to concentrate the gold. I opted to remove the gravel near the tail of the pool, thinking the water would plough through like a jet wash near the top, making it all but impossible for the smaller flakes to settle. Again the bedrock crevices went down a couple of feet, progressively getting narrower, and again too narrow for me to properly work. 
 

“ No offence to you, don’t waste your time” ,there’s those lyrics again, and this time I took heed and decided to refill the confidence meter by heading back downhill, and onto the second part of the day, removing that gravel.

I would sluice and pan out each bucket as I filled them. The last thing I needed was to empty it all out at once only to discover no gold, that wouldn’t be good. 
After two buckets and very little gold I contemplated moving, and here’s where I believe our lives are planned ahead of us. You see I decided to pack everything away and move on to an entirely different stream in an entirely different area of the hills, but after packing everything away and hoisting the backpack up and onto my aching shoulders, I only mane]aged to walk around 30ft to where I saw another bedrock outcrop. This outcrop was different to the one I had worked earlier. For a start the stream below the outcrop widened out as it exited the narrow rocky stretch. The stream slowed as it broke out over an open gravel bed. The actual gravel was very soft underfoot, obviously well worked, but directly below the bedrock was an area I could work by digging down the wall of the outcrop. 
As I removed the rucksack from my shoulders in a writhing fashion I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at the thought I had only walked 10 paces before I had to unpack it all again.

Sure enough the gravel down the side of the bed rock was packed fairly tight and I had to fight my way down through rocks that were difficult to remove. The thought of packed gravels alongside bedrock got me digging like Barney rubble, and after removing and sluicing the 4 buckets it took to reach the bottom of the rock I couldn’t resist the urge to pan it out.  
What would it contain I wondered. Well the answer was sweet sod all haha! Not even a dust particle of gold. I was a little upset. Why had I just not moved on to pastures new when I had my chance?  Why had that bedrock took my attention and stopped me in my tracks, and turned out to be a total waste of time? What was I supposed to do now?

I will tell you what I was supposed to do, because like I mentioned earlier, I firmly believe our lives are set out on paths that are impossible to veer from. What I was supposed to do at that point was finish off the last remaining couple of buckets of gravel that I had gave up on earlier after only finding a few flakes in the couple of buckets I did remove. 
So everything was carried back to the original spot and the sluice set back in place, where it was an hour before. I seem to do more walking than anything else these days🙂

Walking back up to where the pool is, and the last of the gravel didn’t fill me with confidence. The gold I had spent collecting over the past while had all but dried up, but I needed to finish the last of the gravel to remove the “ what if “ factor that would have played in my head, had I not removed it, but before getting the pump in action I took a last look at the bedrock face where it meets the water level. I used my fingers to scrape out any small pockets of stones that were still trapped in the crevices in the vertical wall, and that’s when something caught my eye. It looked like gold, but all my sinews were saying it couldn’t be, I mean how lucky would I have to be to have such a bad day, only to literally walk onto gold. Well it was gold, and a fine gram nugget too. I was overjoyed at my find that was just sat there on the bedrock. I’ve seen this happen in videos, but for it to happen to me was unreal.

I still had to remove the last of the gravel in the pool, which I did, but as I suspected there were only a few last remaining flakes. I obviously wasn’t bothered. I had polished off everything I could in that stretch of the stream and I could now move on without looking back, and it’s a good feeling knowing I would be prospecting new ground when I next go panning.

The walk back up that steep hill and along the old railroad back to the car park in blistering heat virtually went unnoticed thanks to my find. Now that’s what I call dream prospecting👍

til the next time, happy prospecting to you.

Ian 🇺🇸🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🥃

Apologies for any spelling mistakes. The touch screen on this is a nightmare.

STARTING OUT

The thought of prospecting for natural gold had always appealed to me long before I actually went out into the field and did it. You want to get a quick buck, then go put a $ in a vegas slot machine, as you have more chance with that. On the other hand if you want to pull your hair out, then why not come to Bonny scotland for some prospecting. In truth, panning for gold really is nothing more than a hobby I’ve took up. Don’t get me wrong, there are still good nuggets to be found if one is prepared to put in the work, and of course, if the gods decide.

Starting out with just a pan and digging tool, Just trying to find that one elusive speck of gold was a hair pulling time. I spent weeks and weeks without success. Don’t get wrong I had plenty of yellow stuff in my pans. I’m not sure what it was but it wasn’t gold. I went so long without finding any that I began to question wether there was even gold in the area. 
The day I finally found gold was a day on which I had zero expectations that I would find any. I stopped the van at a very popular car park not 6yds from the stream, an area that had obviously been panned out by the folk who didn’t want to put much effort into their hobby, and eureka! I found three tiny specks.
I hadn’t gone into my new hobby totally blind, as i had watched enough videos and read up on the subject for a time before I actually went on that first session, so after trying to find gold in the areas I thought might produce some and failing, to find it virtually under my feet in a very very popular spot…….. well that’s just bloomin typical😂.  To find those three little specks on that day was perfect timing, because I don’t know if I was on the verge of giving up because that’s just not in my genes, But I was certainly fed up to a serious point. 

BUILDING MY ARSENAL

Ok I don’t have much money, the thought of being able to purchase a gold detector will probably remain a pipe dream forever, but there’s one thing I have in abundance, and that’s work ethic. This was instilled in me by my brother during my career in roofing. His motto was that it didn’t matter what tools one had if they didn’t gave the work ethic to use them. 
This attitude helped no end when it came to choosing the tools I needed, not the too,so I wanted. I wanted a high banker, I wanted a mechanical digger, hey! Let’s just open a quarry haha!. Well what I purchased was a gravel pump and a classifier, those were of utmost importance and allowed me to use muscle power more economically. 
I began finding gold with every session, and quickly realised that picking tiny specks, and the odd flake out the pan with tweezers and putting them in a vial just wasn’t good, so the next thing I bought was a snuffer bottle. I was learning and adapting as I went, until eventually I got a sluice box. The sluice was an obvious game changer, but I had my doubts that it would catch the gold. I settled my mind by chucking in the gold I had previously found. I admit this was taking a big chance, well it did at the time, but I needn’t have worried, as the gold sank quickly onto the top of the sluice, I don’t think it even travelled to the following ripple. My mind was put to rest and now I try to set the sluice to run as fast as possible. Maybe I have lost some specks, but as the age old saying goes “out of sight, out of mind. I now have what I deem necessary, including some crevicing tools.
     
LEARNING THE AREA OF WANLOCKHEAD AND THE LEADHILLS

 There is just too much to remember, so instead I have put on the link below. This is an interesting read into the geology of the area i prospect in the lowther hills district. 

https://webapps.bgs.ac.uk/Memoirs/docs/B06088.html

WHAT IVE LEARNED ON A PERSONAL LEVEL

Well first of all I have learned to put the work in if I want to find gold, and even then it isn’t much. To put things into perspective, in the 13 months I’ve been prospecting I have found just under one and a half grams. There is a plus side however. Firstly the gold is very pure, and secondly, and this seems to be running parallel to the experience I have in prospecting, the gold is getting bigger. Certain things have caught me out in the past that I have learned from, like there’s no gold under the false bedrock, something that took me ages to accept. I now look for where the bedrock reaches the surface of the streams, instead of trying to dig down to it, because sometimes the bedrock can’t be reached by this method. I have learned to spot the bedrock in the hills, and I can see where it is close to the surface. Something that I’ve also noticed is that most fellow panners concentrate on where the water enters the pools, totally ignoring the tails where the finer gold accumulates. I’ve also learned to stop looking at the streams as they are, and I now look at where they run during flood, even where they used to run but don’t anymore. 
Only one year in prospecting isn’t much experience, but putting my limited knowledge to work has even found me a couple of rare pickers, so I’m on the right track. I’m getting better and only the other day I reached the dizzy heights where I found 0.416g, and considering I only managed 1.082g up til then I would say that’s a considerable step up in my finds.

below are three pickers I’ve found recently. I say three because the top and bottom pieces are one picker broke in half.

looks just like a flower when pushed together.

Thanks for taking the time to read about my early days in prospecting 

🇺🇸🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🥃 cheers

ian.